Hottest planet is hotter than some stars

THE hottest planet ever found is nearly 3200 °C – hotter than some stars.

The discovery of the planet, called WASP-33b, was confirmed in 2010, when it was found to be less than 4.5 times the mass of Jupiter.

Now Alexis Smith of Keele University in Staffordshire, UK, and colleagues have taken its temperature using an infrared camera on the William Herschel Telescope in the Canary Islands (arxiv.org/abs/1101.2432).

Its record-breaking temperature is partly due to its close orbit around its star, which is just 7 per cent of the distance between Mercury and the sun. Not only that, but, at …

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